Exhibited in Turner’s gallery in 1809 with the following verses:
Where burthen'd Thames reflects the crowded sail,
Commercial care and busy toil prevail,
Whose murky veil, aspiring to the skies,
Obscures thy beauty, and thy form denies,
Save where thy spires pierce the doubtful air,
As gleams of hope amidst a world of care.

There is a preliminary drawing for the whole composition in the British Museum (T.B.CXX-N, repr. Finberg 1910, pl.3), and also some related studies of deer in the ‘Thames from Reading to Walton' sketchbook (T.B.XCV-43, 44). The composition was engraved for the Liber Studiorum, R.26, and published 1 January 1811, as 'in the possession of Walter Fawkes, Esg, of Farnley', who however returned it to the artist at some unknown date in exchange for another work (Thornbury 1862, 1, p.293).

The signature is inscribed in brown; the date, to the left and slightly higher, more carefully in black, perhaps on the picture's return to Turner; it is painted on a distinctly thinner area of paint. The letters 'PP', of which traces seem to remain at the end of the signature, would stand for Professor of Perspective at the Royal Academy, a post to which Turner was elected in December 1807 (see p.181). Unevenly discoloured retouchings in the sky were removed in 1973; in particular the heavy plume of smoke rising just to the right of the right-hand dome of Greenwich Hospital was found not to be original.

Turner has taken one of the classic views of English art, painted innumerable times from the seventeenth century onwards, and transformed it with his sense of atmosphere. At the same time this wide panoramic view, full of incident, is held together in a carefully controlled composition based on a criss-cross of diagonals and the sweeping curve of the Thames. Even the rising plumes of smoke, seen by Ruskin as particularly characteristic of Turner's pictures, play their part.